Dorothy Johnstone had to resign her post at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA ) when she married her colleague D.M. Sutherland, due to the Marriage Bar which prevented married women from holding full-time teaching posts. In other relationships the woman’s career took first place, such as that of Margaret Morris over J.D. Fergusson’s during the 1920s.6 The prolonged ill-health of Hazel Armour’s and Beatrice Huntington’s husbands curtailed their own professional activities.
The success and recognition achieved by the artists during their lifetimes differed: some, including Ethel Walker and Pat Douthwaite, had solo exhibitions and exhibited internationally, whilst others, such as Kathleen Scott Kennet and Phyllis Mary Bone, received multiple commissions. Recognition within the institutions and corridors of power – a useful barometer of cultural change – came late: Norah Neilson Gray was the first woman to serve on the Hanging Committee of the Royal Glasgow Institute (RGI ) in 1921; in 1931, Stansmore Dean Stevenson’s portrait of Neil Munro was the first work acquired by a living artist for the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; and Phyllis Mary Bone was the first woman to be elected a full member of the RSA in 1944.
The posthumous reputations of the artists have varied; whilst Ethel Walker was widely regarded as Britain’s foremost female painter between the wars, she is little known today. In contrast, some of the artists featured, such as Jessie M. King and Stansmore Dean Stevenson, are amongst those since identified as the ‘Glasgow Girls’, the subject of exhibitions and in-depth research.7 The lack of accessible, surviving work has hindered the standing of others, such as Hazel Armour
[Fig.3] Fra Newbery with female students, The Glasgow School of Art (Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh is in the front row, fifth from the left) c.1894
Glasgow School of Art Archives
[Fig.4] Robert Burns with female students, Edinburgh College of Art (Dorothy Johnstone is in the front row, fourth from left) c.1911
Edinburgh College of Art Photography Collection
who lost much of hers in a studio fire, and Ottilie Maclaren Wallace whose sculpture remains largely in private hands. Limited information about certain artists, including Josephine Haswell Miller and Ivy Gardner Proudfoot, has restricted the understanding and promotion of their achievements; there remains great potential for further discovery and appreciation in this field.
Between 1885 and 1965 Scottish women had more opportunities to train and practise as artists than ever before. The examination of the effect of their gender on their experiences and on the recognition they received whilst they were alive, as well as their posthumous legacy, sheds new light on Scottish art history.
TRAINING TO BE ARTISTS
Before the nineteenth century, women were excluded from most forms of artistic training.8 GSA was founded as a school of design in 1845,
and by 1848 its classes were co-educational.9 Its first female member of staff was Elizabeth Patrick, who was appointed in 1855.10 ECA was founded in 1908 as an amalgamation of Edinburgh School of Art (itself a merger of the Trustees Academy and the School of Applied Art), the art department of HeriotWatt College and eventually the RSA School of Painting.11 It had male and female staff and students from the start, including Mabel Royds and Dorothy Johnstone in the School of Drawing and Painting [fig.4].12 As the majority of our forty-five artists attended the GSA or ECA , it is these institutions which are discussed here.
The pursuit of art education by women was often undertaken by those born into artistic families, including Margot Sandeman, Cathleen Mann and Flora Macdonald Reid, whose parents and/or siblings were artists. Others faced familial opposition to their
intention to train as artists, not least Princess Louise who was the first member of the royal family to study at a public institution when she enrolled at the National Art Training School in London in 1868. Jessie M. King’s parents felt that ‘a career in art meant a bohemian life and this was no calling for the daughter of a minister of the Church of Scotland.’13 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham faced such resistance that ‘adolescence for all the Barns-Graham children was marked by her struggle to be allowed to go to art school’ because of traditional attitudes to women and their place in society.14
The majority of Scottish women fine art
students came from middle-class families who could afford art-school fees and did not have to follow vocational courses. When ECA opened in 1908 it charged an annual fee of £5.15 For this reason, daytime classes there and at the GSA had a higher proportion of female students than those held in the early morning and evening, which were mainly attended by men who were in employment.16 Women sometimes had to pay higher fees than their male counterparts, such as those studying at the independent Paris studios in the late nineteenth century, who were charged 100 francs compared to the fifty francs paid by male students.17
As a general rule women were in the minority of students, for example making up twenty-eight per cent of the roll call at the GSA in the academic year 1881–2 and fortyseven per cent in 1911–12.18 Furthermore, the training received by male and female students was different, most significantly in terms of the limited access women had to the life class, considered ‘the bedrock of a professional art education’.19 In this class, models of both sexes posed, often in the nude, for the purposes of studying and drawing the human figure. It was considered morally degrading for women to view nudity and at most they were permitted to draw from a cast and later from a partially
ISABEL BRODIE BABIANSKA 1920–2006
Born Glasgow 1920; died London 2006
Studied Glasgow School of Art 1936–40; Jordanhill Training College, Glasgow 1937–41; and Hospitalfield College of Art, Arbroath 1941
Brodie was born in Glasgow, the daughter of a Clydeside shipyard decorative metal worker. In 1933, at the age of thirteen, she won the silver medal in a competition run by the Corporation of the City of Glasgow Art Galleries and Museums, coming highly commended in the same competition in 1934 and again in 1935. Encouraged by her father, she went on to study at the Glasgow School of Art between 1936 and 1940, where she was taught by Hugh Adam Crawford.
In 1939 Brodie received a travel scholarship to London; however, war was declared shortly afterwards and so she returned the scholarship money and remained in Glasgow. In the same year she exhibited an accomplished self-portrait titled Reflection at the Royal Glasgow Institute (RGI ) that was bought for Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum for £30 in 1940. This contemplative work depicts Brodie in her role as a young artist, with easel side on and paintbrushes in hand. The painterly style is a far cry from her later works, many of which recall the work of the Russian artist Chaïm Soutine.
In 1940 Brodie exhibited a commissioned portrait of Lady Allan Hay at the RGI exhibition. The following year, along with Marie de Banzie, she was commissioned by Glasgow Corporation to design and paint murals in the auditorium of the YWCA headquarters in Bath Street. She collaborated with de Banzie again in the decoration of various transit camps and designed costumes and stage sets for the Celtic Ballet, which had been established by Margaret Morris in 1940.
Brodie also contributed illustrations to Scottish Art and Letters and designed the dust jacket for Poetry Scotland No.2
Brodie married Count Tomasz Babianski, a Polish pilot officer, in 1943, and thereafter exhibited as Isabel Babianska. A founder member of the New Scottish Group, Brodie was among a number of artists whose work benefited enormously from the stimulus provided by the group, a collection of Glasgow-based artists who exhibited between 1943 and 1956. A local art critic was less than complimentary of their work, disliking ‘the shouting of the too-prevalent flame colour’, though acknowledging the ‘imagination among the women painters’.1 Writing about the group’s second show in 1944, Robert Melville observed:
Isabel Babianska and Marie de Banzie obviously work in close association, and are the most restless and experimental members of the group. They are products of the Glasgow Art School, and in some of their works they very effectively employ the Gauguin–Wyndham Lewis synthesis which determines the style of Robert Colquhoun, an artist from the same school, whose work has been exhibited in London. Their response to Jankel Adler has produced some dynamic paintings of war-machines in action, but it is in their portraits that they are particularly outstanding, and their interest in the expressive stylisation of the features of the human face will probably be responsible for their most significant work; they seem less inhibited and more soundly equipped for the approach to Picasso’s special territory than most of the painters who have ventured near that field. Glasgow has reason to be proud of her young painters 2
Brodie gave birth to her first daughter in Glasgow in 1945, before moving to London
where her second daughter was born the following year. She continued to paint and undertook some painting commissions. She held a solo show at the Little Gallery in London in 1948. In later life she continued to sketch, often in ink and occasionally using calligraphy brushes, including fashion sketches for clothing companies. She became a successful model and inherited Whittaker Model Agency from her friend Michael Whittaker, which she ran until her death. Works by Brodie are held in various collections, including Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums). AW
Reflection (Self-portrait), 1939 Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 60.9 cm Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums) on behalf of Glasgow City Council
NORAH NEILSON GRAY 1882–1931
Born Helensburgh 1882; died Glasgow 1931
Studied The Studio, Craigendoran 1899–1900 and Glasgow School of Art 1901–6 Taught Glasgow School of Art 1906–18 RSW
Gray was born in Helensburgh, second youngest of the seven children of George Gray, a Glasgow shipowner, and Nora Neilson of Falkirk. She attended a local private girls’ school then studied drawing at The Studio, Craigendoran when she also became a member of the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists. At the Glasgow School of Art (GSA ) she was a contemporary of Jessie M. King and studied with Jean Delville and Paul Artot. While still a student she exhibited at the Royal Academy (RA ), where she continued to show until 1926. She taught fashion design and drawing at the GSA and remained on the staff from 1906 to 1918. For a short time she also taught at St Columba’s School, Kilmacolm. In 1907 she began to exhibit regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA ). In 1910 she established a practice as a portrait painter in a studio at 141 Bath Street, Glasgow, exhibited at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français in Paris and had her first solo exhibition at Warneuke’s Gallery, Glasgow. She painted mainly in oils but also in watercolour and in 1914 was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour. In addition, her illustrations to Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood were published by Dent in 1913.
The war years inspired some of Gray’s most powerful and important work. The Liégeois in Exile (Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums)) painted in 1914 was exhibited at the Royal Glasgow Institute (RGI ) in 1916, the RA in
1917 and in Paris at the Société des Artistes Français in 1921 where it was awarded a bronze medal. For six months in 1918 she worked at the Hôpital Auxiliaire d’Armée 301 – Abbaye de Royaumont near Paris during a major German advance. The hospital was staffed and run by the Scottish Women’s Hospitals under the auspices of the French Red Cross. Despite the exhausting work, Gray found time to paint the soldiers in the busy casualty reception area of the mediaeval cloister which she described as ‘a view of soldier patients painted from within at the time and true to fact’ (see fig.8).1 Although reserved, she held strong feminist views and did not want this painting to be acquired by the Women’s Work sub-committee of the Imperial War Museum; in 1920 the sub-committee commissioned a more formal version.
After the war, Gray returned to portraiture, producing decorative but unsentimental images of young women and children. Her paintings are characterised by unconventional placing of the figures, unusual colour schemes and shadow patterns, as in Mother and Child. The composition is similar to The Country’s Charge, exhibited at the RA in 1915, but is a more stylised image that uses a limited palette and shadows to dramatic effect.2
In 1921 Gray became the first woman appointed to the hanging committee of the RGI . As James Shaw Simpson remarked: ‘Miss Gray is to be honoured because she has fought her own art battles, and achieved by virtue of her own compelling ability’.3 In 1923 she won the silver medal at the Société des Artistes Français for her painting Little Brother (Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums)). In addition to exhibiting regularly at the RGI and RSA , Paris Salons and London, Gray’s work was shown in Nice, Brussels, Liège, Vienna,
Chicago and Canada and in 1926 she had a solo exhibition at Gieves Art Gallery, London. She received several public commissions and in 1924 was elected to the Society of Scottish Artists. She continued to paint watercolours, often semi-abstract views of Loch Lomond and Loch Long, that presage work done sixty years later.
At the time of her death from cancer in 1931, aged forty-eight, she was considered ‘the foremost Scottish woman painter’.4 A memorial exhibition of her work was held in the McLellan Galleries, Glasgow in 1932 and a retrospective was mounted at Dumbarton District Libraries in 1985. LA
Mother and Child, early 1920s
Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 57 cm
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
PHOEBE ANNA TRAQUAIR 1852–1936
Born Dublin 1852; died Edinburgh 1936
Studied Royal Dublin Society School of Art 1869–72
HRSA
Phoebe Anna Moss was born in Dublin, the sixth of the seven children of Dr William Moss and Teresa Richardson. At the end of her training at the Royal Dublin Society School of Art she was invited by her tutor to illustrate the research papers of Dr Ramsay H. Traquair, a Scots palaeontologist employed by the Royal Dublin Society. She married him in 1873 and henceforth would prepare all his fossil drawings. In 1874 the couple, then expecting the first of three children, settled in Edinburgh on Ramsay’s appointment to the Museum of Science and Art.
Traquair’s Edinburgh art initially took the form of domestic textiles, but in 1885 she was invited by the Edinburgh Social Union to decorate the walls of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children’s mortuary chapel. This kick-started a professional career which would always straddle fine art and craft. She painted two other Edinburgh buildings – the Song School of St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral (1888–92) which made her name in London (thus gaining her husband’s respect) and the vast Catholic Apostolic church in Mansfield Place (1893–1901, now the Mansfield Traquair Centre) – plus two English churches in the 1900s and 1920s.
Physically petite and of a determined temperament, Traquair often sought out people with whom to debate ideas. She wrote to the famed critic John Ruskin to seek advice about illuminating manuscripts in 1887, and soon after befriended John Miller Gray, the first curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and fellow artist William Holman Hunt.
At the height of her career, in the 1890s, when she established her reputation as Scotland’s leading Arts and Crafts artist, Traquair used every available hour to make her walls ‘sing’, to work alone on book art or with fellow bookbinder friends at the Dean Studio in Edinburgh’s West End, or, late at night, to stitch art embroideries at home. She showed at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA ) from 1893 and the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts (Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts from 1896) in 1895, a year when she also exhibited at Glasgow’s massive Arts & Crafts Exhibition. In addition, she regularly contributed to London’s Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society from 1899, joining it in 1903, and to smaller Scottish craft displays, as well as at the World’s Fairs in Chicago in 1893, Paris in 1900 (with the Guild of Women Binders) and St Louis in 1904. W.B. Yeats noted that all her work narrated life’s journey. Drawing frequently on different cultures and much inspired by William Blake or Dante Gabriel Rossetti, her mature way of working was essentially late Pre-Raphaelite yet boldly Celtic in its colour and pattern. Perhaps less known nowadays are her commercial book designs and more ‘ordinary’ easel paintings.
The Awakening is one of the latter. Sourced in a sonnet from Rossetti’s The House of Life, Traquair here revisited both her illumination of 1898–1902 (National Library of Scotland) and her ‘awakening of the spirit’ panel (1895–6) in the Catholic Apostolic church. A vivid palette reflects both her recent illumination colours and her new-found medium of painted enamelling. It was later owned by Mrs Charlotte Barbour, a friend for whom a manuscript drawn from her own Song School border details
(1897, Edinburgh University Collections) had been commissioned.
Having been turned down for professional membership of the RSA , she was eventually elected HRSA in 1920. Her illustrative art, long out of fashion, was rediscovered publicly in the 1990s with a major retrospective at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 1993. EC
The Awakening, 1904 Oil on panel, 63.2 x 151 cm Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh